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00:00Hi, I'm JB Kaufman and I'm here to talk to you about Mer-Babies, which is actually an
00:17absolutely unique Silly Symphony in that it's the one film in the whole series that was
00:23produced outside the Disney studio.
00:26It was released as a Disney film, but not done by the Disney animators.
00:30And to understand how that happened, we have to go back a little ways.
00:34When Walt Disney first started getting interested in animated cartoons, he was a young man living
00:38in Kansas City in the early 1920s.
00:41And he started a company of his own there in Kansas City and he recruited some other
00:45young men his own age who were also interested in animation to work with him.
00:51Later on, when he established himself in California, he got some of those same fellows
00:56to come out to California to work with him there.
00:59And two of the people who did that were Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising.
01:04Well, Harman and Ising worked with Disney for a while and then decided toward the end
01:08of the 20s to split off and form their own animation studio.
01:12So they did, and they made the first cartoons that were released by Warner Bros.
01:18And by the mid-1930s, their studio was making cartoons for the MGM studio to release.
01:24And everything was going fine until 1937, when MGM cancelled their distribution contract
01:30because the studio was starting its own cartoon department.
01:34So Harman and Ising were welcome to come onto the lot and work for them making cartoons,
01:40but they could not maintain their own independent studio for release through MGM.
01:45Well, Harman and Ising had been trying to maintain their independence and they elected
01:49to try to keep that going, but obviously they had a big problem because if they were going
01:54to keep their doors open, they had to have money coming in.
01:56Well, in 1937, as it turned out, Walt Disney had a couple of big problems of his own.
02:02One of them was trying to finish Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because he was committed
02:06to a Christmas opening.
02:08And his ink and paint department in particular had more work than it could keep up with to
02:13try to meet that deadline.
02:16At the same time, he had made a silly symphony in 1935 called Water Babies and had been
02:22trying to develop a sequel to it, but his story department had not yet turned out a
02:28continuity that he was happy with and the project seemed to be stalled.
02:33So the upshot of all of this was that, number one, Harman and Ising basically loaned their
02:39whole ink and paint department to Disney to help out with the workload on Snow White
02:43and Disney farmed out the production of this Water Babies sequel to Harman and Ising to
02:48produce for him, which when you think about it is a pretty big compliment to their abilities
02:54because basically he was going to be putting his name on their work and there wasn't just
02:59any animation studio that could have rated that kind of consideration.
03:06The way they did maintain quality control was that a contingent of people from the
03:11studio, from the Disney studio, would visit the Harman Ising studio once a week and check
03:17on their progress.
03:19And if they saw things that they thought maybe Walt wouldn't be happy with, they would suggest
03:24changes and then the changes would be made.
03:27But ultimately, the final story was developed by the Harman Ising story department and
03:34all of the animation was done by their animators.
03:38And that's the reason why, if you look at a lot of this animation, it just doesn't look
03:42like a Disney cartoon.
03:43The characters are well drawn and they're well animated, but they don't look quite like
03:48Disney characters of this period would have looked.
03:51And in fact, you can see a really graphic illustration of that if you play this cartoon
03:57back to back with the original Water Babies from 1935.
04:01And even allowing for that gap of three years in between, there's a big difference in style
04:07between the two cartoons.
04:15A number of the artists who were working for Harman Ising in the 30s and who worked on
04:20Mer-Babies later went on to work for Disney.
04:24One case in point is Lee Blair.
04:27He was an animator at the time and he did a number of the scenes in this picture, including
04:32the opening ones.
04:33And you'll see some more of his animation later on with the babies dancing on top of
04:37the bubbles.
04:39He was an animator at this time, but he was also the president of the California Watercolor
04:43Association.
04:45And when he went to Disney, he ultimately wound up doing watercolor inspirational paintings
04:50for a number of their films.
04:52His wife, Mary Blair, also worked for Harman Ising at this time and also followed Lee
04:58to the Disney studio.
04:59And at the time, she had very little reputation outside of watercolor aficionados circles.
05:07But she later became very, very well known for some of her work on the Disney films.
05:12And if you've seen, well, any number of things, the Latin American films that they made in
05:16the 40s, the later films like Alice in Wonderland and Disneyland attractions like It's a Small
05:23World, you've seen the work of Mary Blair.
05:44Now you're going to see here very shortly the ballet scene of the babies dancing on
05:51top of the bubbles.
05:52And this is going to be some more of the work of Lee Blair.
06:09Now this whole episode was developed at the Harman Ising studio.
06:13Very little of the story material that the Disney artists had come up with.
06:18There's one of his dancing mermaids now.
06:21Very little of the story material that the Disney artists had come up with actually wound
06:25up in the film.
06:26That circus parade in which you saw octopi that stood in for elephants, that was a Disney
06:34story idea that did wind up in the film.
06:36But most of this stuff was devised by the Harman Ising story department.
06:52And in fact, there's going to be kind of an interesting coincidence coming up here in
06:55that department.
06:56I don't want to give anything away, but there's going to be an episode here in which this
07:02whale that's providing the bubbles for the dance, the whale is about to start feeling
07:07like sneezing.
07:08And that's going to take the story in a whole new direction.
07:11Now a sneezing whale isn't exactly an everyday occurrence, but it just happens that at the
07:15same time, the Disney story department was working on Pinocchio.
07:19And of course, a sneezing whale played a very important part in Pinocchio.
07:49Now, there was one interesting postscript to the story of Mer-Babies, and that is that
08:02years later, in 1957, it was shown on the Disneyland television program on an episode
08:10called More About Silly Symphonies.
08:13It was their second program on Silly Symphonies.
08:15The funny thing was that it was introduced as Water Babies.
08:19Walt Disney's introduction described the making of the 1935 film, but then when the
08:25film was shown, it was this one.
08:28So I hope you've enjoyed this showing of it.